But first a short recap for new readers (welcome!).
Rather than do the rational and fiscally responsible thing and contract out our election work to another public body, Clarkston officials – more specifically, city manager Jonathan Smith – insist on hiring clerks who don’t want to stay employed at the city, and many of them have created a lot of unprofessional drama during their employment and/or as they were leaving. Yet for the longest time, Smith urged the council that if we just paid more money for a clerk, we could hire someone competent who would stay and we’d all live happily ever after.
So, despite reasonable concerns about her employment history which included frequent, recent job hopping, the city hired our current clerk, Angela Guillen. In order to give Guillen the salary and benefits she demanded, taxpayers were forced to pay .691 mills more in taxes and obliged to forgo all or most of the money from expected property tax increases for the 2026-2027 fiscal year (and beyond), money that we could have used for something constructive that we actually cared about. To be fair, the .691 mill property tax increase was also used to give Smith a fat $13,000 increase (that he insisted he had to have or he’d quit because he claimed it would be totally disrespectful not to give him more money if we gave the clerk more money even though Smith is the one who asked the council to give the clerk more money) and to overpay the treasurer at the top of his salary range and far above the local market rate – though Smith and city officials admitted that securing Guillen’s employment was the driving factor behind the tax increase.
Guillen rewarded our generosity by practically walking off the job late last year in favor of a new job with Meridian Township. I say “practically” because she gave us four days’ notice. Since she was eligible to collect holiday pay for two of those days when the office was closed, it was effectively two business days’ notice. And to add insult to injury, Guillen didn’t bother to resign in writing.
Why did Guillen quit? Because even though we gave her all the salary and benefits she effing asked for before the budget was approved in July 2025 due to Smith’s insistence that we just “had to have her,” it still wasn’t enough. Guillen told Smith that after a great deal of thought, she saw no other alternative but to leave because she simply could not afford to continue to work for Clarkston due to home and health-related expenses.
How much time did Guillen spend contemplating quitting her Clarkston job and considering the alternatives? Not much.
Guillen was on our payroll for about two and a half months before she applied for the job in Meridian Township. (Her Clarkston hire date was July 1, 2025, and her Meridian application date was September 19, 2025.) Meridian offered Guillen a Deputy Clerk job on December 17, 2025, a job that came with a phenomenal benefit package that included a traditional pension plan and boatloads of other generous goodies along with a $77,480/year salary. Guillen made a counteroffer of $85,000/year but ultimately settled for $83,262.40 with the promise of a raise after a year. Apparently, she was more interested in securing a higher Meridian salary than she was treating Clarkston with even a modicum of respect, since Guillen didn’t bother to negotiate a two-week notice period and told Smith on December 30 that she would be starting her new job on January 5.
In the next installment of the never-ending saga of revolving door Clarkston clerk drama, Guillen showed up at city hall on January 14 and begged Smith to rehire her. Smith asked Guillen if she would be willing to sign an agreement to stay for at least one year, an offer he had zero authority to make. The annually renewable contract draft I reviewed was lopsidedly in favor of Guillen because it would limit the reasons the city could terminate her employment. It would also have penalized Clarkston if we explored contracting out election work since we’d have to pay Guillen the equivalent of the balance of her annual compensation for the then-current contract year. What was the contractual penalty to Guillen if/when she walked off the job again? Nothing.
I promised I’d bring you up to date with more information, so here goes.
So why did Guillen leave Meridian? Apparently, after a mere ten calendar days on the job and one day after begging Smith to take her back (and before city council had the chance to approve her rehire in a meeting that was open to the public rather than through phone calls and emails with each other and Smith), Guillen called Meridian to say she’d arrive later in the morning to work, turned over her office keys, and reportedly told the “Clerk’s office staff” that she “can’t do this.” Yep. That was her actual stated reason for leaving a job with incredible salary and benefits. Guillen didn’t even have the professional courtesy to return Meridian’s follow up calls and her record reflects a voluntary quit due to job abandonment with no opportunity to ever be rehired. We’ve been given no public explanation why any of this happened even though we’re paying Guillen’s salary and are entitled to know if she’s continuing to explore jobs elsewhere and has plans to abandon her Clarkston job (again). I guess Clarkston shouldn’t complain about the amount of notice Guillen gave us before leaving in December – we effectively received two business days’ notice while Meridian received no notice and a key toss.
And what was one of Guillen’s first acts as a rehired Clarkston employee? Falsely claiming a new job title of “City Clerk/Deputy City Manager” in her official government email signature block. My FOIA request asking for any records that established an office of “deputy city manager,” demonstrated that Guillen formally held such a position, or provided proof that Guillen had any authorization whatsoever to hold herself out to the public as a “deputy city manager” was denied, meaning that Guillen apparently decided to promote herself into a nonexistent position. In his response, Smith admitted there were “two verbal discussions” about possibly creating such a position but he didn’t say when the discussions occurred or who was present. (Note: only city council can create new offices, not Smith, and they have to do it in a public meeting.) Smith claimed Guillen’s signature block title change was an “error” that “has since been corrected.”
An error? Email signature blocks don’t accidentally change themselves.
I don’t think I’ve ever seen a manager behave more stupidly than Smith has when it comes to Guillen. Since they’ve crossed paths, Smith has abandoned his fiduciary obligation as a public official and has acted in ways that further Guillen’s interests, not ours. He ignored her employment history, forced us to pay thousands for a salary survey and salary structure that he immediately trashed when it proved the salary Guillen wanted was much higher than the salary market for a small city like ours, insisted on a tax increase to meet Guillen’s salary and benefit demands (and used Guillen’s increase to get a $13,000 raise for himself), took her back after she quit on two days’ oral notice in the middle of the holidays, apparently tried to get the city to negotiate a lopsided contract with her that prevented us from contracting out election work unless we paid her off and allowed her to quit again without any penalty,* is likely discussing promoting her, and he could not care less if she “erroneously” makes a misrepresentation to the public about the extent of her job authority in the meantime. (And guess who paid the legal fees to deal with Smith’s stupid employment contract idea? Yes, that would be us.)
Whatever is going on with Guillen that caused her to essentially walk off two jobs in a little over two weeks in December and January, Smith is a fool to think she has any plans to stay in Clarkston. And if Smith has grand plans to convince the city council to slide Guillen into the city manager job when he leaves at the end of the year (and yes, I’m still betting that’s the case because he will be eligible for the maximum Social Security benefit at age 70 to go along with his rich retirement benefits from a “big three” automaker in addition to his other financial endeavors), then Smith is even more gullible than he objectively appears.
If Guillen thought she was worth $85,000 as a clerk, how much more will she demand in salary if she can add a “city manager” or “deputy city manager” title to her resume? And wouldn’t this defeat the purpose of overpaying Guillen in the first place? We only did this because Smith said that we “had to have” Guillen working for us as the clerk if we wanted to have elections in Clarkston, claiming that we couldn’t continue to be a city without her.
How much more would Guillen insist we pay her to take the Clarkston city manager’s job, or even the currently nonexistent deputy city manager’s job, neither of which she’s qualified for? Haven’t we seen how costly it is to taxpayers to hire a city manager who doesn’t know what he’s doing after living through nine years of Smith? And if Guillen were promoted to city manager when Smith leaves, how exactly does that help the city? We’d still need someone to perform the clerk’s function. A scenario that would continue the revolving door for clerks and promote someone to city manager with a history of job hopping sounds like a recipe for disaster, doesn’t it?
The fact remains that offering Guillen a higher-level title of any kind would simply allow her to broaden her employment search and apply for clerk and city manager jobs elsewhere – because our 880 residents will never realistically be able to afford to pay Guillen the salary she believes she’s entitled to receive.
I’ve said it often, but it remains true. Clarkston government is a clown show. Now I’ll go even further. However well-intentioned this cityhood experiment was at the time, it’s been a miserable failure. We are getting close to a scenario where almost half our tax dollars go to pay employee salaries, yet we get almost no city services in exchange. As I write this, your city government is working on ways to raise your taxes (again) while expending zero effort to reduce expenses because there’s apparently no wasteful spending at city hall.
It’s time to seriously talk about a scenario that allows Independence Township to run the city while retaining local control for the historic district (since that’s the only thing the old guard crazies seem to care about).
* – I sent a follow up FOIA request for the most recent draft of Guillen’s contract or a signed copy of the contract. Both requests were denied due to nonexistence of such records. Presumably this means that someone in the city woke up to the fact that this was another stupid Smith idea – and perhaps my email to city council members explaining why it was stupid idea helped. 🤷